RVC is the only fund of funds in Russia. We do not invest directly in companies. Instead, we create new venture funds in collaboration with professional investors and managers. These funds are created by RVC in partnership with private, institutional and foreign investors, as well as large corporations. The funds, in turn, invest in technology companies. This is one of the main areas of RVC's work, the results of which we summarize and report annually.
RVC has 29 funds in its portfolio. In 2019, their cumulative volume grew by 32% and reached 64.4 billion rubles
in RVC funds as of the end of 2019
325 investments approved for portfolio companies of RVC-backed funds
RUB 28.9 bn the cumulative amount of approved investments in portfolio companies
Exits are the key performance indicator for venture funds. Having invested in a company, a fund exits after some time (usually 7-10 years) by selling its share in the company’s capital. The exit is considered successful, if the fund makes a profit from the sale of its share. For RVC, which is a fund of funds, the main result is the closing of the fund. In 2019, Maxwell Biotech – the first fund from RVC's "historical" portfolio – closed with a positive financial result. Maxwell Biotech was created in 2008, and since then it has invested in nine medical projects and become Russia's first venture capital fund focused on innovations in biomedicine.
12,9%
average return (Gross IRR) of all RVC funds’ exits in 2019
The cumulative financial result of RVC’s exits has been positive for the fifth consecutive year.
| Fund name | Fund amount as of the end of 2019, RUB mln |
|---|---|
| RVC Biofund | 1 500,000 |
| RVC Seed Fund | 1 982,000 |
| RVC InfraFund | 2 600,000 |
| Civil Technologies MIC | 500,000 |
| Bioprocess Capital Ventures CE VF | 3 000,000 |
| VTB – Portfolio Investments CE VF | 3 061,000 |
| Leader-Innovations CE VF | 1 380,406 |
| S-Group Ventures CE VF | 1 160,645 |
| Softline Seed Fund IPA | 136,000 |
| High-Tech Seed Fund IPA | 133,600 |
| ACP Seed Fund IPA | 33,400 |
| Venture Fund Accelerator IPA | 133,400 |
| Life Sciences Seed Fund IPA | 133,600 |
| Tomsk State University Seed Fund IPA | 33,400 |
| Fund name | Fund amount as of the end of 2019, RUB mln |
|---|---|
| RBV Capital | 2 070,700 |
| Da Vinci Pre-IPO Fund | 4 272,914 |
| Da Vinci Pre-IPO Tech Fund | 6 000,000 |
| Terra VC | 2 550,55 |
| RBF Ventures | 1 400,000 |
| Skolkovo Venture Fund – IT I | 2 303,030 |
| Skolkovo Venture Fund – Agrotechnological I | 250,000 |
| Skolkovo Venture Fund – Industrial I | 2 424,242 |
| Far East Fund for the Development and Implementation of High Technologies | 4 900,500 |
| National Technology Initiative Venture Fund | 1 870,000 |
| New Industry IPA | 4 040,404 |
| Pharmmed Innovations IPA | 4 568,528 |
| Venture Fund to support promising educational technologies in the digital economy IPA | 7 002,020 |
| Russian Venture Capital I LP | 2 779,633 |
| RVC IVFRT LP | 1 454,853 |
All around the world, venture capital investments are associated with high risks — even the most experienced investors sometimes invest in projects that won’t «take off». Hence, the success of portfolio companies is crucial for venture funds. We continue to follow the delevopment of projects, which have received investments from RVC-backed funds, and we regularly share news about their progress.
In 2019, top positions in terms of the volume of exports were attained by the following RVC’s portfolio companies: Perm Chemical Company (fine and specialized chemical products), RMT (technologies for the production of thermoelectric materials), Pogarskaya Potato Plant (potato flakes producer), National BioService (research biobank), and Cinemood (portable projectors producer). Moreover, a number of companies including Iiko, iVideon, GFS, Visitech, ExoAtlet and others are successfully selling their products and services on global markets.
The National Technology Initiative is a long-term program aimed at creating new global markets, which will emerge in the next 10-15 years, and achieving Russia’s technological leadership by 2035. Global leadership refers to the success of Russian companies at the international level. Today, the NTI unites thousands of people including technology entrepreneurs, scientists, inventors, representatives of development institutions, government agencies, as well as expert and professional communities. Schoolchildren and university students, who will be shaping the development of new markets in the future, are also included in the NTI ecosystem via a number of educational initiatives. RVC has played a key role in the implementation of the NTI since 2015, and it has been functioning as its Project Office since 2016. This means that RVC is providing project management, organizational, technical, expert and analytical support, as well as informational and financial assistance for the development and implementation of roadmaps and NTI projects.
The experience of various countries, including Russia, shows that administrative barriers often impede technological development. The NTI set out to develop legislative roadmaps that will allow to enhance legislation and eliminate these barriers. Such roadmaps for seven market areas have already been developed and approved by the government, and working groups started to implement them. In 2018-2020, working groups submitted 60 bills and draft regulations designed to weaken business barriers, 40 of which have been approved. In 2019, 33 such regulations were passed.
Standardization is another area of RVC’s work. In 2019, we initiated the creation of the «Artificial Intelligence» Technical Committee 164. In December 2019, the first two national standards in this area were approved: GOST R 58776-2019 «Mechanisms for monitoring behavior and anticipating people’s intentions. Terms and definitions». and GOST R 58777-2019 «Air transport. Airports. Technical means of inspection. Methodology for determining indicators of quality recognition of illegal items from shadow X-ray images». And thanks to the efforts of the RVC-based «Cyber-physical systems» Technical Committee 194, the first national standard for the Internet of Things — the IoT Protocol NB-Fi developed in Russia — was approved. International experts supported another option presented as a standard for the Internet of Things — as a fully-fledged protocol of the LoRaWAN family. Moreover, TC 194 has shown impressive growth, reaching 100 participating organizations by the end of 2019.
Throughout the year, RVC has been working on improving its interactions with NTI market roadmaps’ working groups for searching, initial structuring and prompt assessment of NTI project requests. To that effect, we have developed key critical requirements for project goals and KPIs, as well as a number of requirements for results and justification approaches, selection and administration of support measures.
In 2019, RVC actively promoted the implementation of the «NTI Regional Standard» in the regions of the Russian Federation, which is a set of guidelines for regional authorities, fast-growing technology companies and leading universities that want to participate in NTI. As part of this effort, RVC is actively working with regional partners to develop NTI projects. In 2019, targeted work was organized to involve regional projects, particularly, in those parts where the NTI Roadmaps were approved. For these purposes on-site consultation sessions were put in place. This work format involves a trip to the region by a team of RVC representatives to give presentations about support programs, provide consultations for project teams and preliminary project reviews. In 2019, consultation sessions were held in Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Perm, Saint-Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Rostov, Yakutsk and Krasnoyarsk. As a result, over 100 project applications were proposed by regional companies to the NTI support programs, 25 of which were supported (received approval) by the Project Committee.
The TechUp national rating of fast-growing Russian technology companies — another support measure — has been compiled annually since 2012. It is aimed at identifying, monitoring and promoting promising technology companies with strong leadership potential in both Russian and global markets. The companies in the rating also get on the priority lists for government support and receive PR and GR assistance for the Russian market. TechUp is compiled by RVC in partnership with the Association of Innovative Regions of Russia (AIRR) with the support of PwC, which developed the methodology for the rating, and MSP Bank.
In 2019, the total revenue of companies in the TechUp national rating amounted to 220 billion rubles. IT companies demonstrated dynamic growth, as did the companies in industrial equipment and engineering — they made up 29% and 23% of the total number of companies in the rating, respectively. More than 40% of TechUp-2019 companies came from the regions of Russia — with Kazan, Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Perm and Kaluga emerging as major regional innovation centers.
The NTI Competence Centers operate as consortiums: universities and scientific organizations become platforms that connect scientists and businesses. The key objective of their collaboration is to develop projects with both scientific and commercial value. Each Center has industrial partners — these are companies acting as customers. This allows scientists to create projects and products, for which there’s market demand, and thus to earn money. Since 2017, RVC has been conducting competitive selections. After selecting the sites for the Centers, RVC continues to assist with their activities by providing strategic planning recommendations, monitoring and analyzing performance.
We have created a development program for each Center, which is spread out over several years and includes targets for revenue and attracting private funding. The assumption is that financial support, which the Centers received from the state at the start, will allow them to achieve these indicators and develop into commercially successful structures.
In 2019, the number of consortium members increased by 40%. Currently, more than half of them are commercial companies such as Sberbank, MTS, KUKA, Rosatom, Gazprom Neft and others. The number of customers of the NTI Competence Centers grew by 76% compared to 2018 and exceeded 190 organizations
Educational programs are developed via the collaboration of consortium members and range from master’s programs to advanced professional education. Business and government agencies are directly involved in the process, thus students are able to gain knowledge and practical skills that they will be able to apply in the future
Technology contests have existed for several centuries. In Europe, the first such competitions were held at the beginning of the XVIII century. The participants had to perform tasks that hadn’t been attempted before, such as creating an airplane that could fly from Europe to America. Technology contests started to flourish at the beginning of the XXI century.
The principles remained the same, but instead of airplanes the teams had to create unmanned vehicles and missiles. The United States has hosted a number of competitions over the years. These included the DARPA Grand Challenge — for the makers of drones, the Ansari X Prize — for space engineers, and the Netflix Challenge — for the developers of AI algorithms. Then, Russia also caught up with this trend. In 2017, RVC, the SKOLKOVO Foundation and the Agency for Strategic Initiatives launched the country’s first technology competitions as part of the NTI. After reviewing the results of the first two series of contest, we launched new ones in 2019.
Winter City is a contest in unmanned transport technologies. The global benchmark for the development of such technologies has been set at a fairly high level, but many unresolved problems still exist.
Developers have not yet been able to create an unmanned car that can function in winter — with poor visibility during snowfall or in the dark — and comply with all road traffic regulations. Before the launch of Winter City, it seemed that there were no developers in Russia attempting to solve this problem. However, over 30 applications were received, nine cars competed in the qualifying tests, and five teams participated in the final race at the NAMI testing site in the Moscow Region. Although the teams couldn’t overcome the technological barrier, they managed to achieve unique results — for both Russia and the world. Moreover, they created a professional community of engineers and developers of unmanned transport in Russia, which continues to operate beyond the duration of the contest.
To create and showcase a self-driving car that can move around the city in winter at different times of day and at the level of an average driver. At the testing site, the UAV needed to travel 50 km in the presence of other autonomous cars and simulators in under 3 hours. Penalty minutes were added for violations of road traffic rules.
StarLine team from St.Petersburg achieved the best result. Their vehicle completed the distance in 2 hours and 47 minutes, but violated road traffic rules a number of times, for example, by ignoring a red light. Rule compliance was being monitored by the judges and by automated control systems with high-precision cameras and traffic trackers. Thus, StarLine got 73 penalty minutes for violations.
A satellite hackathon competition called Ice Vision was held as part of Winter City. The task was to develop software (based on CCTV cameras) for a self-driving car that would improve the quality of recognition of road signs in unfavourable weather conditions. 26 teams reached the finals, and these included MIPT, SFU, Skoltech, MSU, NSU, SPbPU, HSE, and Innopolis University, as well as teams from major foreign universities in the USA, China and South Korea. The first place and 1.5 million rubles were awarded to NtechLab team. The second place and 300 thousand rubles went to the team of Lomonosov Moscow State University and HSE. And the third place and 200 thousand rubles was won by a team from SibSU. A participant of the Winter City competition — the StarLine team — became a strategic partner and co-organizer of Ice Vision and gave out 100 thousand rubles as an additional prize for each team in the Top 10. The partners of the hackathon included MISIS, StarLine, Skoltech, NVidia and Sberbank.
"First element" is a contest in hydrogen fuel cells (HFC) technology.
HFCs convert hydrogen’s chemical energy into electrical energy via a process of hydrogen oxidation with oxygen. Unlike batteries, they do not accumulate electrical energy. Instead, they draw it from hydrogen reserves, which can be quickly replenished. Thus, there is no need to wait for HFC power-generating systems to charge, as with traditional batteries. The «First Element. Air» contest finished in July 2019. Participants had to overcome the technological barrier by creating hydrogen fuel cell power systems for small drones. In terms of efficiency, the installations had to be comparable to internal combustion engines. Although the participants didn’t manage to overcome the technological barrier, the result of two teams were close to the established threshold.
The teams had to overcome the unit's specific energy density of 700 W*h/kg
Three teams qualified for the final. Unmanned Helicopter Systems and Polytech showed best results by attaining energy density of 529.3 W*h/kg. Their installations remained in flight mode for 2.5 hours.
In December 2019, RVC, ASI and the SKOLKOVO Foundation launched READ//ABLE — a new technology contest for the developers of AI algorithms in speech technologies.
The task was to create an AI product capable of identifying the meaning of a text and analyzing cause-and-effect relationships in a variety of contexts. The algorithm must also be able to pinpoint grammatical, speech, logical, factual, and ethical errors, explaining them in short comments — at the level of a human specialist. The competition will continue until the end of 2022, and the testing will be carried out until one of the teams overcomes the technological barrier. Text analysis competitions will be held in both Russian and English — each with a prize fund of 100 million rubles. The contest is open to foreign teams as well.
To develop an AI system that can analyze the meaning of texts at a specialist level, identifying factual, logical and semantic errors.
The algorithm will have 30 seconds to analyze an essay of up to 12,000 characters.
First tests are scheduled to take place in the fall of 2020
GenerationS is a platform for developing corporate innovations and the largest corporate accelerator in Russia and the CIS. In 2019, GenerationS was named one of the Top 5 best government accelerators in the world according to research by UBI Global.
GenerationS implements comprehensive corporate development programs, including internal — to stimulate internal entrepreneurship; acceleration programs — for scouting and acceleration of external projects, and international — to educate employees on the methods of creating and managing innovations based on the experience of leading international corporations. In 2019, the line of corporate products was expanded to include online and face-to-face educational programs, innovative audit and strategic development services.
The infrastructure of the accelerator encompasses more than 16,000 startups from 30 countries as well as 400 corporate and ecosystem partners.
This year’s #GENSTalks events abroad were held in Kazakhstan, Estonia and Germany
In 2019, RVC implemented the provision of support measures as part of the «Digital Economy of the Russian Federation» national program. Competitive selections of leading research centers (LRC) and leading companies in the development of products, services and platform solutions based on end-to-end digital technologies have been successfully completed.
The winners of the LRC competitive selection included educational and research organizations, which will be developing digital technologies in collaboration with commercial companies acting as industrial partners of LRCs. Having approved LRCs technical briefs and activity programs, these companies will then be able to implement the resulting technologies.
The leading companies will develop and market new products based on end-to-end technologies with enhanced characteristics (compared to the alternatives that are available on the Russian market). As a result of project implementation, the revenue from the sale of new products should significantly exceed the amount of government support.
The competitive selection of LRCs and leading companies was initiated by the Ministry of Communications of the Russian Federation as part of the «Digital Technologies» Federal project of the «Digital Economy of the Russian Federation» national program.
Government support for leading research centers and companies is needed to ensure the digital transformation of priority sectors of the economy and the social sector. This is achieved by stimulating the development of end-to-end technologies, technological solutions and technology-based products. These technologies include AI, robotics and sensor components, quantum technologies, distributed registry systems, wireless communication technologies, new manufacturing technologies, as well as VR and AR technologies.
Educational programs matter for RVC. It would be impossible to achieve our goals without first training the leaders of future startups, scientists, technology project managers and venture fund managers. We run our own educational programs and courses on technological entrepreneurship, while also supporting the NTI Kruzhok Movement and contributing to the organization of the NTI Contest and University 20.35. Furthermore, RVC supports community development by organizing industry events and awards, and developing Rukami — a large-scale project of technical creativity.
The NTI Kruzhok Movement Contest is an engineering competition for schoolchildren and students. It is held across 19 profiles, which are all related to technologies of the markets of the future and include unmanned transport, smart energy, small space technology, neurotechnology, etc. Such choice of profiles allows children and teenagers to go beyond the school curriculum by solving complex interdisciplinary problems. The format of the competition teaches them about teamwork. Winners and prize-winners can apply to study at the organizing universities without having to pass entry exams, or they are awarded extra points on admission. In 2019, a new project was unveiled: the NTI Contest.Junior is a track for students in grades 5-7. Prior to that, there were just two tracks: for students in grades 8-11 and for bachelor students.
In 2019, the NTI Lessons initiative was held for the second time. In this project, teachers are provided with free teaching materials for grades 7-11 in six subjects: «Man», «Environment», «Information», «Strategy», «Technology», and «Production». More than 1500 schools from 79 regions applied.
In 2018, in partnership with MSU and ITMO University, RVC developed «Innovative Economics and Technological Entrepreneurship» training course to be taught as part of university education. The course is free and distributed under a free license. Universities only have to apply and wait for the selection results. The course trains students’ practical skills; they learn how to create high-tech products and services, manage tasks in technology transfer and licensing, launch startups, carry out commercial R&D, hire teams and draw up action plans for bringing products to market. In 2019, we scaled the course and started to develop specialized versions for NTI markets.
For this specialized pilot course, we chose the Healthnet and Neuronet markets because of their development potential and business specifics (regulatory framework, product creation cycle, sales, etc.). The objective of the course is to create conditions, which would allow new projects in healthcare technologies to emerge in leading medical and other universities. The structure of the «Technological Entrepreneurship in Life Science» course has already been drawn up in collaboration with Sechenov University, and the universities are planning to test it in 2020.
In 2019, RVC launched Rukami — a large-scale project of technical creativity. This is a non-profit initiative aimed at attracting the attention of young people and the general public to technical creativity, making, and creating individual projects in technological clubs. And for the leaders of such clubs, we run educational and networking events, at which they learn how to attract and retain new audiences and foster sustainable communities.
The Rukami Tech and Creativity Festival is the main event of the entire project, and it was held in the regions and in Moscow in 2019. The participants had a chance to present their projects, or they could try their hand in creating amazing devices, installations and performances right on the spot. The headliners of the Rukami festival in Moscow, which was held at VDNH, included musicians, artists, entrepreneurs and other interesting guests.
The Basic Department of RVC «Management of Technology Projects» has been running at MIPT since 2011. Only a year later, in 2012, the Department introduced its first master’s degree programs for training future professionals. At the end of 2019, the Department was offering two master’s programs: «Venture Investments and Technological Entrepreneurship» and «Project Management for AI technologies». The first program is aimed at preparing students for working in venture funds, technology companies and startups; and the second teaches how to work with machine learning in technology companies or join research laboratories.
Tech in Media is an all-Russian competition for journalists and media covering the subjects of science and technology. In 2019, the competition was dedicated to the NTI. Applications were accepted in six areas: